Caucus crazy.

• Author: Segal, David
• Position: Special interests in Congress

Did you know that when National Guard soldiers spend two days training, they get paid for four? Nice deal, huh? It comes courtesy of the U.S. Congress, which more recently did the Guard an even bigger favor by pressing the Pentagon to reduce Guard ground combat units more slowly than active duty troops during the military's downsizing.

The argument that you hear in both the House and Senate is that the country should rely more on these reserves because they cost less. They are cheaper--about one-third cheaper--but what you don't hear is that they are a lousy value, and not just because of the two-fer pay scheme. "They're less expensive, but you get what you pay for," says William Kaufman, a defense analyst and professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology In other words, these soldiers are about one-third as well trained and about one-third as capable as their active counterparts, making them less than ideal for both rapid deployment (it takes them weeks to get ready) and peacekeeping missions (it takes training to know when not to shoot)--precisely the kind of missions we're likely to need them for in the coming years. It's worth remembering that most of the Guard's ground troops called up during the Gulf War weren't combat-ready until Schwarzkopf was delivering his "Hail Mary" press conference after the fighting was over.

In reality, Congress' affection for the Guard probably has less to do with cost than with constituents--Guardsmen and -women across the country who are organized and lobbied for by one of Washington's quieter, though highly effective outfits, the National Guard Association. "These guys make the NRA look like amateurs," says the Brookings Institution's Martin Binkin. You get a sense of their clout from a pair of letters sent by a group of legislators to Colin Powell back in 1991, letters which basically said, "If you make deep cuts in the Guard, you'll have to come to Capitol Hill with a very good reason." The letterhead on those missives read "Congressional Guard Caucus."

You've probably never heard of it, but the caucus, orchestrated by the Guard Association, boasts a super majority of 70 members in the Senate, making it the chamber's largest. The group's success during the downsizing can be understood this way: a special interest (the Guard) won itself a favor (fewer troops cut), at the expense of others (active troops). It's thus a classic Washington tale, similar to auto interests keeping gas taxes pinned so low that the government has to spend hundreds of millions to keep up the highways. Or the tobacco growers maintaining federal crop subsidies even as the Surgeon General implicates cigarettes in the deaths of 400,000 Americans each year. Or the elderly lobby insisting that even the wealthiest retirees receive Social Security and resisting curbs on the growth of all middle class entitlement programs, programs which will cost $700 billion annually by the turn of the century if Congress doesn't intervene.

Caucuses like the Guard's--there are now about 40 others in the House and Senate--are superbly emblematic of this special interest problem, and they also exacerbate it. Mancur Olson, the author of The Logic of Collective Action, once wrote of the federal government that "Most redistributions are from the unorganized to the organized." A caucus adds a pernicious twist to Olson's ageless verity: it turns the members of Congress themselves into lobbyists. Caucuses are thus another facet of the every-group-for-itself ethic that now pervades Washington, an ethic which has led to legions of perverse subsidies, dubious tax breaks, and a calcified government so besieged on all sides that it can barely creak into action when it attempts serious reforms.

The genesis of caucuses can be traced back to 1958, when a group of liberal Democrats founded the Democratic Study Group. The idea was slow to catch on; through the 1960s, only two more groups were founded, but by the 1970s Congress was crawling with them. Most charge no dues to join, and only a few have their own staffs or offices. Some of these groups are extremely active, others will be dormant for years until an issue pertinent to the group arises. What unites these groups...